Original author: Jason Chen, independent researcher

Editor's note: Recently, the topic of whether major trading platforms charge "currency listing fees" has once again been pushed to the forefront. In particular, both Binance and Coinbase claim that they do not charge currency listing fees, but some project owners have stated that they have paid high currency listing fees. For details, please refer to: "Coinbase and Binance, who is charging sky-high currency listing fees?". Independent researcher Jason Chen compared and analyzed the currency listing application forms publicly available by Binance, Coinbase and Upbit on X, hoping to find more useful information. BlockBeats reproduced the full text as follows:

Apart from the US election, the most exciting thing recently is the Rashomon incident between Binance and Coinbase regarding listing fees. The bosses of the two exchanges both claimed that they do not charge listing fees, but at the same time, multiple project parties "exposed" each other for being charged high listing fees. But no matter what, Binance and Coinbase have officially announced that all their listings are free, and both of them have simultaneously disclosed their listing application forms. We don’t know what is underwater, but at least let’s see what we can read from the content above the water.

The following is Binance's public listing application form. Let me show you what information Binance cares about most about the project: https://forms.monday.com/forms/4a221d053f7fc70151c0704d80969a5c?r=use1

After filling in basic information including project name and introduction, the first thing is to choose who recommended you to apply for listing on Binance? There are four options, Listing BD manager, Binance Labs invested project, BNB chain Grant project, Others, a total of 4 options, 3 of which are directly related to Binance. The order of the options from top to bottom can also explain the priority to some extent, so it does mean that if you can "get" Binance, you do have a chance to get Binance.

Apart from the basic information of the project, the next question is the valuation and the proportion of community token distribution. Binance has also been very strict on these two issues after this round of Fud VC coins.

Another interesting question is what benefits has it brought to Binance? In fact, there is nothing wrong with it, but the rough answers may be similar. After all, the core goal of the exchange is to attract new users, and they should all try to rely on this.

The next step is to intensively ask questions related to project data, including TVL, number of users, community, geographical distribution, etc., as well as how to continue to maintain community development. These indicators are mainly used by exchanges to judge how much buying power a project has.

In addition, they specifically asked whether your project will be deployed on the BNB chain. It can be seen that even if the BNB chain is not as glorious as before, Binance is still tilting resources to a certain extent.

The last two questions are whether the unlocking time can be extended and whether the valuation is willing to be lowered. These two questions are the last bottleneck. After listing on Binance, the project team investors are really forced to modify the unlocking terms to more than 1 year. As for lowering the valuation, maybe it is to give Binance Labs an investment opportunity? Because I don’t think there is any direct relationship between valuation and opening price. It is more of a psychological anchor and the behavior of market makers.

Let’s go to Coinbase’s coin listing application to see what are the differences and features. The link is as follows: https://coinbaseex.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_7X1x3nDyKcZbfrE

Except for basic information, the first question asked is very local, "Will your assets and platform be sold in the US market?" After all, as a compliant exchange, it must first ensure how deep the relationship between the project and local US users is.

The next question is also very interesting. Is there any super user permission for anyone in the project's assets? That is, one person may affect the status of the entire asset. It can be seen that compliant exchanges are still cautious in terms of security. If you choose yes, you need to fill in a lot of information about how to manage super permissions. However, most projects currently have super permissions, at least in the form of multi-signature.

Then what? That's it. Yes, Coinbase's application form for listing coins has just this little content, that's it.

Finally, let's take a look at Upbit's listing application. The link is as follows: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScfjLtrinP9znyp39t6nm5Pgu5Z5X5klr17TLfl-DKzJ-KOMw/viewform

The first question is not to fill in the project information like the above two, but directly ask for KYC, upload your ID card copy and phone number and real name, etc. It is worthy of being a compliant exchange, even more ruthless than Coinbase. No matter what project you are, KYC first.

There is actually no special information below, just submit the project information normally, but you can directly choose what trading pair you want, you can choose Korean won, Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, etc., and you can only choose one. I don’t know what the meaning of this question is, I will definitely choose Korean won.

To sum up, these exchanges have officially declared that they do not charge listing fees, and there are public channels for listing applications. Then it can be seen from the application form that Binance is relatively "subjective", including the recommender of the listing, what benefits it can bring to Binance, whether BNB is deployed, etc., and it also attaches great importance to the community and user data of the project.

Coinbase and Upbit, as compliant exchanges, focus on compliance. Coinbase cares about project security issues, while Upbit directly asks for your ID card.

Currently, the entire cryptocurrency industry has reached a very twisted stage, with a large number of conflicts and intersections, such as Dex and Cex, VC and retail investors, ETF and lack of innovation, etc. How to break through? As a small retail investor like me, we can only endure.

Original link